best of 2022

The Best Books I Read in 2022

This post was originally sent through my author newsletter on December 23rd, 2022. To subscribe to my newsletter and receive up-to-date news, musings, and more, click HERE.

Hey, look! We've just about made it to the end of 2022! 

This will be my final newsletter of the year—I plan to take next week off, and will catch up with you in January. Enjoy your holidays and your break! 

Since I basically did my own year-in-review a few weeks ago, in my newsletter about gratitude, I thought this week's installment would be a perfect spot for me to list my favorite books I read this year. I keep a reading log every year, and I love gathering the stats on what I've read! Before I jump into my faves, here's a bit of data. 

As of the moment I'm writing this, I have finished 111 books this year. I am currently reading one, so I anticipate my total for the year being at least 112. I DNF-ed (Did Not Finish) one book I started. The 112 books on my list are all chapter books or longer—but it's important to note that I read a number of early chapter books with my daughter that are not reflected on my personal log. 

The age breakdown on my list: 

  • 11 chapter books 

  • 9 middle-grade books 

  • 13 young adult novels 

  • 79 books for adults 

One reading goal I have for 2023 is to read more middle-grade stories, in anticipation of my own middle-grade debut with The Thirteenth Circle in early 2024! 

The genre breakdown (keeping in mind that some books blur boundaries): 

  • 21 contemporary stories (realistic fiction) 

  • 13 fantasy stories

  • 70 romance novels (contemporary and historical)

  • 2 novels-in-verse

  • 3 historical novels (not historical romance) 

  • 1 nonfiction book 

  • 1 mystery

  • 1 historical/contemporary/sci-fi 

Yes, 70 is a lot of romance novels! But those really have been my comfort reads lately. Gotta love books where everything is guaranteed to work out in the end. Plus, they mostly come in series, in which case I have to read five or six in a row to see everyone paired up! ;)

My goals as far as genre in 2023 are to read more nonfiction, as well as to read more books that aren't straightforward contemporary stories. More sci-fi! More mysteries! Etc. 

One other stat I track: 87 of the books I read this year were borrowed from the library. Hooray for the Brooklyn Public Library! The rest I own, either as ebooks or physical books. 

And now, without further ado...here are ten books I read and loved in 2022! I highly recommend each and every one of these titles. 

Adult Contemporary/Literary Fiction

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin 

Adult Romance 

Book Lovers by Emily Henry
Very Sincerely Yours by Kerry Winfrey
The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston 

Adult Mystery 

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman 

Young Adult Fiction 

Lawless Spaces by Corey Ann Haydu 
An Arrow to the Moon by Emily X.R. Pan 

Middle-Grade Fiction 

The Mythics: Marina and the Kraken by Lauren Magaziner
The Marvellers by Dhonielle Clayton 
Hummingbird by Natalie Lloyd 

(Honorable mention: Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr)

What were your favorite reads of 2022? Did I miss anything you absolutely loved? Help me jump-start my reading list for 2023 by sharing your recommendations! My Libby app is ready for action. 

Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year! 

~Kathryn 

What I'm: 

Reading: I'm almost done with Hummingbird by Natalie Lloyd, which I shared on my Instagram but didn't officially recommend here. It's an absolutely wonderful middle-grade story about a girl with osteogenesis imperfecta, aka "brittle-bone disease," starting at her local public middle school after years of home-schooling. At the same time, a magical wish-granting hummingbird is rumored to be returning to her small Tennessee town. If Olive can find the hummingbird before anyone else, will her wish come true? Natalie Lloyd writes such gentle, heart-warming, magical books, and even though this isn't a holiday story, per se, it's perfect for the holiday season. 

Watching: I'm in the mood for Christmas movies! We recently watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Elf with the kiddo. I try to watch White Christmas every holiday season. What are your favorite holiday movies, the ones you return to year after year after year?

Eating: Since I am the primary stocking stuffer at my house, I buy a lot of chocolate at this time of year. Too much chocolate, one might say. (I can't help it! If the bags of Lindt truffles are buy one, get one free, I have to, right?) 

Loving: I got to observe my kiddo's after-school gymnastics class this week, and it was such a joy to watch her trying and enjoying all the moves!

Feeling Grateful

This post was originally sent through my author newsletter on December 2nd, 2022. To subscribe to my newsletter and receive up-to-date news, musings, and more, click HERE.

I love Thanksgiving, as a concept. I love the idea of celebrating gratitude. I even love the idea of posting things I'm grateful for, small and large, every day for the whole month of November. (That last one, I've only been able to make happen once, in 2017. I was a new mom. I had a lot of time on my hands...) 

But this year, November kind of...slipped by. For starters, our whole family got a nasty respiratory virus. My daughter had it first, and then a week later I started coughing, and then a week after that, my husband decided it would be fun for him to hack up a lung as well. With all that coughing (and for my kiddo, a fever and vomiting), neither my husband nor I got a solid night's sleep for over three weeks. 

Being sick and run-down, plus having a huge amount of work to do, plus getting ready for a trip (and kiddo's first time on an airplane since 2019)...let's just say I was grateful to make it to Thanksgiving Day in one piece! Never mind writing thoughtfully about gratitude. 

Now here we are, a week later, and I've had a little time and space to get my thoughts together. 

Since launching this newsletter, I've written a lot about the ups and downs of publishing. I've tried to be honest when things aren't going the way I'd hoped. But when I make myself sit and think about what I'm grateful for...well, there are a lot more ups than downs at the moment. Which is pretty amazing! 

I released two books this year. I worked hard to promote them. They were well-received. I'm so grateful to have David Dixon and Madison Morris out in the world, for kids to read and enjoy. 

I sold another book. I'm incredibly grateful for my Thirteenth Circle coauthor, MarcyKate Connolly, who makes writing about these characters and their adventures so much fun. It's a treat to get to create together. 

I'm grateful for my publishing team: my agent and my various editors and illustrators and designers and everyone else responsible for turning my manuscripts into books that are sold to the masses. I'm also grateful that this year, I chose to work with a marketing consultant to take more control over promoting myself and my writing. Thanks to Dan Blank, I felt empowered to try new things, to pitch myself in ways I wouldn't have before, and to proudly share my accomplishments. Doing the things Dan urged me to do wasn't always easy. In that sense, this was a year of growth for me, and growth years are always valuable. 

I'm grateful for school visits. Talking to kids is truly one of the highlights of this career. The kids I meet—my readers—inspire me and push me to keep going. 

I'm grateful that, despite my dire predictions a few weeks ago, Madison Morris is NOT a Mouse! got put on a "Best of 2022" list! Huge thanks to Melissa Taylor at Imagination Soup for naming Madison one of her favorite chapter books of the year. 

I'm grateful—so grateful—for the words themselves. For the act of writing. Most of the fiction I worked on this year, from The Thirteenth Circle to my unsold magical middle-grade book to the write-for-hire project I auditioned for in October, was a joy to write. That is not always the case! It's a gift when the writing is fun and fulfilling. 

I could keep going. There's so much more gratitude to go around, if you take the time to meditate on it.  

(And it should go without saying that I am the absolute most grateful for my husband and child. They are my everything.) 

So why write it all out? Those ups and downs I mentioned earlier—the downs feel a lot less, well, down when I take time to remember the ups. "Have an attitude of gratitude" may be a Home Goods throw-pillow cliché, but I've found that it feels a whole lot better to be grateful for the good than to wallow in the bad. And yeah, I did some wallowing this year. Of course I did. But I don't want to end the year that way. I want to end the year feeling grateful. 

What are you grateful for in your professional or personal life this year? 

~Kathryn

What I'm: 

Reading: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin was so very good!  

Watching: I did it—I watched the Lindsay Lohan Christmas movie on Netflix. Falling for Christmas is exactly what you'd expect from a holiday rom-com about a hotel heiress getting amnesia and recuperating in a small-town bed-and-breakfast, where she starts to get a crush on the owner (a cute, kind widower, obviously). If you're a fan of the Hallmark Christmas genre, you'll most likely enjoy this. ;) 

Listening to: We've put up our Christmas tree, which means I can start listening to Christmas music! Do you have a favorite Christmas Pandora or Spotify station? 

Eating: I got my husband a six-pack of Jeni's ice cream pints for his birthday in mid-November. My favorite flavor of the bunch: High-Five Candy Bar (peanut butter, chocolate, pretzels). It was obscenely delicious. 

Loving: This tree, which my daughter named "Buttercup."  

Welcome to End-of-Year List Season

This post was originally sent through my author newsletter on November 18th, 2022. To subscribe to my newsletter and receive up-to-date news, musings, and more, click HERE.

It happens around this time every year: the "Best Of" lists start showing up.

Every author I know has a love/hate (let's be real, it's mostly hate) relationship with these end-of-year lists. Hundreds upon hundreds of books are traditionally published in a given year, and in mid-November, every media outlet that discusses books starts rattling off the titles you absolutely can't miss.

Why does this occur in mid-November? To jump-start holiday gift-giving season, of course!

And why do most authors groan and hide their heads in the sand as the lists start popping up online? Because very, very few of us will ever appear on one.

It can be easy to feel, as these lists get bandied about by every influencer in the biz, that your own book is a flop. That no one read it, and since it didn't hit a "Best Of" list, no one ever will.

That's simply not true. Books do tend to find readers, whether or not they receive the world's biggest promotional push. (Do they find more readers with heavy promo from the publisher and media outlets? Obviously! But the number without that backing is still not zero...) The lists tend to be highlights reels, featuring the same couple dozen books that have gotten attention all along—and there's much more to this industry than the highlights reels.

I've had two books be named Editor's Picks for Best of the Month by Amazon: The Distance Between Lost and Found (in February 2015) and Tally Tuttle Turns into a Turtle (in September 2021). Neither of those books went on to make the site's year-end roundup. But that doesn't diminish the accomplishment of being a monthly pick! Nor does my other books not being chosen by Amazon's team as Best of the Month upon their respective releases mean that those books are of lower quality. Getting starred or listed or featured is amazing, but it's not everything.

I will admit, I've been struggling with how much the Class Critters series seems to have flown under the radar. I'd expected a bit of a slow build for a new series, especially launching during an ongoing pandemic, but the momentum never did pick up with each new book release the way I'd anticipated and hoped.

And yet! The readers that have found the series seem to have really loved it. I haven't come across any bad reviews online. (I just got an incredibly positive mention for Tally Tuttle on Twitter this week!) Compared to my YA novels (each of which earned its fair share of one-stars on Goodreads...), my chapter book series has been incredibly well-received.

All of which to say, I will be very, very surprised if either David Dixon's Day as a Dachshund or Madison Morris is NOT a Mouse! shows up on any Best Children's Books of 2022 lists. (I will eat crow and share everywhere if I turn out to be wrong!!) But I've been doing this long enough now that it's no longer a disappointment not to, say, be nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award. I can be happy for my friends who are getting the honors and mentions, and then I can get back to work.

~Kathryn

What I'm:

Reading: The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston. This is romance/women's fiction about a ghostwriter who can literally see ghosts. Florence Day writes romance novels, but after a bad breakup, she no longer believes in love herself. After her father dies, she finds herself back in her hometown with a to-do list of eccentric requests for his funeral, a manuscript that she can't seem to finish, and a host of literal and metaphorical ghosts—including, surprisingly, her new book editor, who seems to have died right after she last saw (and kissed) him. I'm not done with this yet, but I feel confident recommending it to you even without knowing how it ends!

Writing: Remember how, last week, I got to the last page of the manuscript I'd been revising? Well...I started a reread from page one on Monday, quickly found a new plot hole, and had to rework a bunch of things. That's what I get for writing triumphantly about momentum last week! *facepalm*

Watching: We're about halfway through season 5 of "The Crown." From what I understand, a lot of Brits are up in arms about how the royal family is portrayed...but honestly, the Windsors were a total mess in the '90s! The depiction of now-King Charles doesn't shy away from his many scandals, but does show someone who is eager to support charities and modernize the institution. Maybe it would hit differently if I were a monarchist...

Loving: This "koila" my daughter drew as part of her kindergarten homework. ("Draw something that starts with K and try to sound out and spell the word.") It just makes me smile. :)